Letters of Intent received in 2017

LoI 2019-2004
CHALLENGES IN GALAXY EVOLUTION IN THE BIG-DATA ERA

Topics

- the symposium will revolve around big challenges in galaxy evolution and on how future big-data surveys and simulations can help addressing them:
+ stellar mass assembly, morphological transformations
+ star-formation regulation, feedback, black holes
+ galaxy-halo connection
- big-data surveys: EUCLID, WFIRST LSST …
- big-data simulations
- how to unlock discovery potential
- data analysis:
- machine learning, deep-learning
- data visualization
- new tools to compare observations and simulations?

Rationale

Astronomy is entering the big data era. New surveys that will be available in 2-5 years will contain multiwavelength images of billions of galaxies and spectra for many tens of millions. The increase of computing power has also enabled hydrodynamic numerical simulations that incorporate our knowledge of physics in a cosmological context and produce large amount of simulated data, spanning most of the Universe’s life. The assembly histories of billions of galaxies are encoded in these extra-large datasets. Extracting and interpreting the information is a new challenge with no valid solution yet. To date, the power of these datasets to establish casual links between objects is under exploited because of the degeneracy between common observables and physical processes. The meeting will intend to bring together astronomers and computer vision experts to think about key challenges on galaxy evolution and how the big-data revolution can help solving them, ~ 2years ahead the launch of EUCLID.